With increasing popularity, consumers worldwide are purchasing goods and services on credit. For many purchasers, the most convenient form of payment is a plastic card with a magnetic stripe, an embossed account number and/or a smart chip called a credit card (hereafter “card” or “cards”).
Cards may be used at service establishments (S/Es) (e.g., automated teller machines (ATM), point of sale (POS), and instances when no card is required during the transaction such as purchases over the Internet) that have entered into agreements with an Acquirer for the S/E to accept cards from cardmembers to charge purchases of goods and services or for cash access. An Acquirer may be, for example, a nonfinancial or financial entity that specializes in the marketing, installation and support of POS card acceptance at S/Es. Acquirers generally negotiate a contract with the S/E to accept a brand of cards (e.g., AMERICAN EXPRESS®, VISA®, MasterCard®, DISCOVER CARD®.
Card Issuers are typically banks and other financial organizations (e.g., Bank of America®, Citibank®, MBNA America®, Chase Manhattan Bank®) operating under the regulations of a card issuing association or entity. The cardmember enters into an agreement and establishes a card account with the Issuer. The Issuer's name generally appears on the card and cardmember's payments are typically sent to that Issuer.
Occasionally cardmembers may receive unsatisfactory goods or services from the S/E, be involved with a dispute over price with the S/E, or the S/E may have failed to comply with the regulations and/or terms of its card acceptance agreement with the Acquirer. Typically the cardmember then notifies the Issuer about the dispute with the S/E, which prompts the Issuer to begin a dispute resolution process with the Acquirer on behalf of the cardmember.
In order to substantiate the dispute claim of the cardmember, the Issuer may first make a “retrieval request” to the Acquirer. The receipt for a cardmember's purchase or credit transaction containing the details of any transaction carried out at the S/E is called the record of charge (ROC). A retrieval request may include a request for either an original ROC, a legible reproduction of the ROC, or any other transactional documentation from the Acquirer. The documentation supplied by the Acquirer in reply to a retrieval request is called “fulfillment.”
A typical “chargeback” is a reversal of a credit transaction which is “charged-back” to the Acquirer from the Issuer. The Acquirer may refute the chargeback and process a “second presentment” to the Issuer with additional documentation. A “final chargeback” by the Issuer to the Acquirer occurs if the Issuer refutes the “second presentment” by providing additional documentation.
The aforementioned dispute handling process between Issuers and Acquirers is largely a manual documentation gathering process. Each step, beginning with the retrieval request, requires copying, mailing or faxing documentation. Communication between the Issuer and Acquirer is on-going until the dispute is settled. The entire manual process may consume valuable employee time and resources. Further, while the dispute is being settled, the charge remains pending on either the cardmembers account or on unreconciled billings.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a credit dispute system and method that increases the efficiency of the process. More particularly, there is a need for a system and method of processing a credit dispute that allows an initiator (such as an Issuer) to begin a dispute process by, for example, initiating a retrieval request to a responder (such as an Acquirer), then allowing the responder to fulfill the request in a real-time processing environment.